Intro: How Not-Young Is Robert De Niro?

2019's The Irishman was touted as a breakthrough in cinematic de-aging technology. Martin Scorsese's gangster epic promised to make Robert De Niro (then 76) and Al Pacino (then 79) look decades younger, allowing them to portray characters in their 20s, 40s, and later as dying men in their 80s. The end product was notable (they tried their best) but not particularly convincing.

Watching this movie made me feel like a bad person: For the first two hours, I was singularly preoccupied with how not-young Robert De Niro looked while portraying a 30-year-old gangster. His facial features were de-aged a few decades, but his movements and posture were those of a 70-year-old. At one point, De Niro awkwardly shoots a fellow gangster before making a modestly paced getaway, and I winced, and then I felt bad for wincing, and now I feel bad for writing about it.

Watching The Irishman prompted a low-stakes moral conundrum:

• Was I being ageist?: Younger actors frequently play older characters, so why not the reverse? Have I internalized some societal bias against aging performers?

• Did this casting decision diminish the film's entertainment value?: Movies rely on the suspension of disbelief, and this scenario may have been a bridge too far. If you're paying attention to De Niro and Pacino's physicality, you're not paying attention to the story, which means this filmmaking choice was a miss. Viewers can assess ethics and entertainment value independently.

The Irishman suggests that older actors may, in certain cases, be better suited for much younger roles. While the success of this experiment was debatable, the attempt challenged long-held assumptions about how age dictates casting and career trajectory. Do actors like De Niro and Pacino actually improve with age, only to be sidelined by entrenched industry norms? And is this question even answerable, given how Hollywood operates?

So today, we'll examine how an actor's age influences critical and commercial success, how casting opportunities evolve over time, and how Hollywood's attitude toward aging has shifted over the past two decades.

Do Actors Get Better With Age?

There is one major caveat to this analysis: the core question is highly complex, maybe even unanswerable. Yet this unanswerability is what makes the topic worth exploring. The crux of the problem lies in causality: if Hollywood systematically avoids casting older performers, then our dataset will